Mountaintop Removal Takes a Hit
Environmentalists have been pushing hard for the Obama administration to ban mountaintop removal coal mining, in which a mountain is removed with explosives to reveal seams of coal.
They just got some unlikely allies: scientists. A new study published in the journal Science calls for a ban on the practice.
"Scientists are not usually that comfortable coming out with policy recommendations," said Margaret Palmer, an ecologist at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science and the study's lead author, "but this time the results were overwhelming."
The chief revelation was that ecosystems don't appear to be able to recover from MTR, which sometimes blows up forests and always leaves huge piles of rubble in mountain streams.
The study also found contamination of water ways and municipal water supplies well downstream of MTR sites. In heavily mined regions, more than half of young fish were deformed.
"The deformed young fish - that is really the red flag," said Dennis Lemly, another study author. "You can see right away that you are over a serious threshold."
In September, the Obama administration had held all MTR permits pending intensified environmental review. But earlier this week, the EPA angered coal activists and environmentalists by approving a West Virginia project.
Cameron Scott
writes The Thin Green Line blog at SFGate (San Francisco Chronicle).
COMMENTS (4)